This entry in O'Reilly's "A Designer's Notebook" series explores how best to use Adobe Photoshop's image manipulation powers to digitally restore or retouch images for a variety of purposes. As with the other books in the series, it is translated from French and features the work of a variety of freelance photographers and "photo retouching agents." In workshop format, it tracks the step-by-step creation of photographic retouching, from review of the initial image, collaborating with an artistic director, choosing the format, selecting the type of impression the image should create, and more. Packed with wonderful artwork and generous illustrations, the slender volume offers a host of practical advice from experts even as it eschews the traditional format of the "Photoshop bibles" so often marketed.
This book isn't Photoshop for Dummies; it's an advanced book specifically designed for those who want to know more than how to use a few filters to "spice up" their pictures. For example, in one studio session Gerard Niemetzky outlines the process he undertook while restoring some hundred year old photographs for a historical family album. A number of the images required extensive restoration work before they could actually be used in the final work, a CD-ROM which was to be delivered to each member of the family. He scanned the images and used Photoshop to touch them up.
For one image, not only did he want to restore the image itself, but he wanted to save the original paperboard support as well. Scanning the image vertically failed to preserve the embossed image of the frame, so he scanned it horizontally. Even though the image was in black and white, he scanned it using RGB colors in order to "preserve the faded, sepia shade that is so typical of old prints."
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